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Not to Eliminate The Ego

The goal is not to kill the ego—not only because it will not die anyway, it also informs us. We are trying to learn to live with ego. We are working to gain a mastery of its functioning so that we are not dominated by its genius. We want to befriend the ego, to know it for what it is—in all its horror and all its glory—so we can slowly begin to find within ourselves, and identify with, that which is not ego, the perception that arises outside of egoic functioning. Mariana Caplan

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3 thoughts on “Not to Eliminate The Ego”

The way I think of it is that universal consciousness is all well and good, but if we didn’t have an ego we wouldn’t be able to go to the supermarket and buy the food we need to sustain us. The ego is the conscious thinking self and we need to be able to think in order to live our lives.

The short-comings of the ego are twofold. 1. To the extent that it is insecure it attracts attention towards itself and away from everything else and distorts our perception to protect those insecurities. 2. Because reality itself can only be described but not experienced via thoughts, it may be necessary to temporarily set the ego aside in order to perceive something more authentic.

The ego is a tool which needs to be kept flexible if it is to serve us well.

I like the way that you describe that. The experience that I have come to have, however expressable it might or might not be, is that the ego is subtely affected by seeing the bigger picture although it still retains peculiarities and uniqueness and imperfections.The flexibility that you raise seems to involve being able to see the ego from the big picture and not holding so tightly to the egos projections but to use them in a way that helps to understand. Things are constantly changing so that flexibility is fundamentally important.

IRIS PHOTOGRAPHS

So we have to understand the existence, this life, our relationship to society. We have not only to understand our relationship with each other, with society, but to bring about a radical change in that relationship. And that is our responsibility. I do not think we feel this urgency. – Krishnamurti